and, yes, I did see your translation of the marriage record. I wonder what happened to Maria, their child. When I look on the US census sheets from 1910, I see a child "Mary" but her date of birth is listed as 1905 - seems a stretch to pass the child as being born 4 yrs later when the child was young. I wonder if their first child died. I tried to look at the death records, but it would take me forever and a day to try and find a Maria Alessi in 956 records that I can barely read. Part of what started me on this path to tracing the family wasn't only sheer interest, but I have a daughter and granddaughter with a recessive genetic disease that would have cause children back in those days to die very young. I can't trace the disease back to my mother's maternal side, but don't know much about the rest of the family. I'm wondering if the Alessi side was the carrier of that gene, and wondering if they had many deaths of young children along the family line. That said, there were so many reasons for young children to die back in those days, I suppose.

vmdavis52 wrote:Erudita - How do you find records so quickly? Is it because you read Italian and are able to go page by page and pick up the right ones so quickly, or is there a search feature specifically for the microfilm records on the Family Search site? The nice gentleman who initially found the records for me gave me directions on how to find the microfilm records and mentioned he looks for indexes, but how do I find the individual indexes within the larger records?

I'll work on figuring out how to post the images more correctly, and will pay better attention to the record number.

Thank you. Very happy to be finding all this information out. It's fascinating to learn.

Valerie

Hi ValerieI wish I had an easy answer to your question. Normally, but not always, there is an index after every year of a particular type of record-so you may have an index after 1866 births, for example. I say "not always" though because I have done research in some towns which may have in excess of 1000 births in a given year, and then may place the index for that particular year somewhere in the middle of the records for that year. I have also seen indexes at the beg of a year of records. Sometimes there is no index at all for a given year. So I usually start by looking for the index at the end of a particular year. I only go record by record if I can't find an index or the index is impossible to read. I have been researching microfilmed Italian records for close to 20 years, and that's why I can usually find things quickly. In the case of the marriage record you posted, the info about Maria's birth is in the handwritten section at the bottom of that record. Once I saw that info, I was able to quickly locate her birth record. I am not a fluent speaker of the Italian language. I studied the language in college many many years ago. I just spend a lot of time deciphering and translating these types of records, so I am pretty fluent in reading them quickly. I still get stumped though by surnames and street names in towns in which I have never before done research.

I found a death record for Maria. She died at age 10 months in the house at 29 via S. Maria. The record is number 25 dated Aug 14, 1902, but she died on the 13th. Angelo, her father, was living in America at the time of her death. Lucia was in Campofelice.

This record is image 816 of 951 images of the death records from 1862 to 1910.